Character Bio: Li Neko the Necromancer

• Direction: South.
• Name: Li Neko.
• Nick Name: Li the Necromancer, Death´s Lover.
• Sex: Female.
• Animal: Cat.
• Color: Pink/Purlple.
• Virtue: Love.
• Power: Necromancy, spiritual energy syphoning and manipulation.
• Season: Summer.
• Region: Love Carnival, Living Death Land.
• Theme: Carnival, fair, cemetery.

Personality

Li Neko is a female cat which uses Egyptian symbology and aesthetics. Due to the nature of her powers, her age is unkwon and is said to even be one of the original Virtues. Time has slowly affected her, by forcing her to live in an endless cycle where she has to say goodbye time and time again to everyone dear to her as they die of natural causes, while she keeps on living without aging a day. As a result, Li Neko is a very sensible and unbalanced creature. Being the virtue of love, her natural inclination to hold affect to those around her has turned into a curse she can´t escape. This has made her shut down to the other virtues and rely only on the companionship of those who will never leave her: her resurrected dear ones. These actions creep out the other virtues and in turn, they´ve all decided to stay away from her, thus strengthening the feeling of loneliness Li feels, as zombies are nothing but memories of the ones she once loved and can´t provide the real companionship a living being would.

Li has realized this and she´s become bitter towards her zombies, seeing them as reminders of all she´s lost and won´t be getting back, to the point of not allowing them to enter the cemetery where their real bodies rest and taking it upon herself to keep it clean and tidy. She passes all her days there, remembering the past days when she wasn´t alone.

Powers

Li is the most versed virtue in the manipulation of Spiritual Energy. She has developed many incredible techniques that allow her to perform some amazing features. She is known most of all for her abbility to resurrect anyone as a zombi under her control. She can also extract the Spiritual Energy from any living being and use it to launch huge energy blasts, create energy shields, fade her physical body, create illusions, materialize energy as weapons...Truly, no one is able to even come close to her mastery when manipulating the otherwise unstable Spiritual Energy.

But perhaps her most lethal ability is to dematerialize her body and mix it with the Spiritual Energy flowing through her region, allowing her to be in all places at all times and directly manipulate everything even from big distances to savagely attack intruders. This has made the South Region earn the nickname of "The Living Death Land".

Setting

Li is trapped in a fictional happy past where she was hapy with her friends and dear ones. Her pain of losing so many loved ones has made her turn her region into a dead zone where no living creature roams. She´s come to see death as a celebration, as a rite of passing for someone to become a zombi and keep her company forever. As such, she´s turned the whole region into a carnival with many colors and places to enjoy her time with ther zombies., crowned with a cheerfully decorated cemetery. However time passes and her initial joy steadily turned into disdain, so today the carnival is far from it´s prime and looks rather spooky. The cemetery however is under her direct supervision and not a day passes since everything is cleaned up and conditioned, perhaps a testimony of how much Li still loves her dear ones and wants to preserve their memory. Pity the fool who may lay a feet on this sacred tribute to their memory!

The zombies

The zombies will need to be funny! They´re not really bad, they´ve been stripped of what made them "human" and only follow Li´s commands...But they care for her and are full of sorrow to see what she has become and how sad she is. They´ve spent hundreds of years trying to cheer her up and thus, now all their actions are comical out of the habit. They´ll be using many circus-related apparel to attack the player, constantly trying to kill him...or make him laugh! The final objective of the zombies is to make Kitsune understand the problems of Li and try to sympathize with her, maybe even becoming her firend and saving her from loneliness.

Story

Li was attacked by one of the Black Masks but she had no problem in reducing it before it was even close to her thanks to her Living Death Land. When she was about to destroy the Black Mask, something surprised her: this being wasn´t purely alive, but it clearly was alive in some sense! Puzzled by this, Li discovered that the Black Mask was in fact made by dark energy and thus, she wouldn´t be able to resurrect it as a zombi if she destroyed it. Knowing everything about Li, the Black Mask used this opportunity to present itself as the manifestation of Li´s greatest wish: an eternal companion that, like her, couldn´t die and would be with her forever. Not a mindless zombi, but something with a mind of it´s own. Trembling with emotion, Li accepted the Black Mask and allowed it to become one with her.

This is a situation completely different to that of the other Virtues: Li has accepted the Black Mask of her own free will, which allows the Black Mask to amplify her powers even more than normally. But, as the Black Mask hasn´t really subdued Li´s mind and taken control, Li can´t be forced or manipulated to do anything she isn´t willing to; it´s a symbiotic relationship.

However, the Black Mask has enouraged Li to finally set in motion a plan that could destroy all of the Spirit World: by gathering an immense amount of Spiritual Energy Li may be able to perform a real resurrection and bring back all her loved ones. This poses some serious risks: first of all it would disrupt the life cycle and no one, not even Li herself, knows of the repercussions this could have. And secondly...in order to gather the insurmountable amount of required energy Li would need to syphon all the energy from every living creature in the Spirit World!

Locations

• Love Carnival: A colorful, creepy carnival. Heart signs and cheerful decorations, but washed out by time. Blinking lights, dust, broken decorations...
• Cemetery: A clean and beatiful cemetery. Lots of decorative vegetation, statues...Huge contrast with the dark and moody tones of the other settings.
• Abandoned temple: The love temple has been abandoned and is in a pitiful, crumbling state. Li has moved her residence to the cemetery and has neglected her duties as guardian of the Seed of Love...but not completely, as a strong barrier of Spiritual Energy still blocks the path to the chamber where the seed is located. This location will be visited 2 times: a first time where the empty temple will be slowly crumbling over Kitsune. When she reaches the boss chamber it will be empty as well and the energy barrier will block her path forward. The floor will crumble and Kitsune will fall to the secret exit of the level. This exit will take her to the tower, where after some levels she´ll fight Li in the cemetery. After the fight, Li will take Kitsune to the Temple and dispel the barrier, allowing her to take the seed. 

Level ideas:

A constant through the region will be the Living Death Land: Li will present herself to Kitsune as soon as she enter the South region and manipulate the land to hinder Kitsune´s advance.

• Energy stealing: Kitsune will constantly lose spiritual energy, once the counter is depleted she will die. The Astral Palm powerUp greatly reduces the rate at which energy is stolen, but to regain energy Kitsune must beat the zombies she finds along the way. Zombies are immune to Astral attacks and can only be beaten with the Shadow Edge.
• Ferris wheel: Set in the Love Carnival, a series of differently sized and poorly maintained Ferris wheels. Circular platform of different radius + falling platforms.
• Roller Coaster: A roller coaster level. The platforms will be of different lengths and some will fall off. The crisis could make the roller coaster crumble and Kitsune escape by running on a single wheel.
• Love Parade: A parade of floats made by the zombies themselves! The floats should tell Li´s story, how in the beginning she had lots of friends but as time passed by they all turned old and died, leaving her alone. This will be their way of making the player understand what she´s through. Gameplay-wise the level will focus on the zombies, giving them all kinds of crazy artifacts to attack the player. The level will be focused on combat and every float will be a small bossfight against one or several zombies. Ideas for attacks and equipment:
• Blackboard and nails: A zombi that scratches his nails on a blackboard, producing an irritating sound that will paralyze Kitsune.
• Cold water buckets: Buckets will cold water, if one falls on Kitsune it will temporarily paralyze her. The zombies could follow up with somekind of electrical device malfunctioning and electrocuting her. Maybe using a defibrillator on a zombi to electrify him and make him follow the player through some platform layout. The wet platforms (from the water in the buckets) could conduct electricity, so the player must avoid being in the same platform as the electrified zombi. Maybe another zombi could be pulling a level to powerUp the electrified zombi and the player can get rid of this one to make the electrified one powerless.
• Cake fighting: Zombies will throw cakes at the player. If a cake hits, the player will loose visibility for some time and may get hit.